Latent historic and scientific ignorance remains a fixture of popular culture. The vaccine enthusiasts like to hurl terms like “plague rat” at the refuseniks. Of course, the use of such a term is a great irony. It only confirms that the user does not understand the meticulously documented spread of the plague. How, I must ask, can someone expect to understand the spread of a novel virus, where the body of knowledge is changing in real time, if they spread misinformation on one of the most well-researched pandemics in history?
Why do people think rats caused the plague?
Well, because most people learned it in school, which may just highlight how poor and inflexible the western education system has become since the rat theory has been discredited for decades. Sure, there is something romantic about the idea of a plague rat. After all, who doesn’t hate rats? But hate does not make something true. I personally hate bats, but that does not mean we can ignore the high likelihood that humans, not bats, were responsible for SARS-CoV-2.
What makes the rat theory implausible is the fact there is is little mention of rats in plague infected areas and, more importantly, scant archeological evidence that they were present in large enough numbers to spread the plague as quickly as it spread. If anything, rats were present in cities and in ports, yet the plague spread everywhere throughout Europe. For the plague to have spread so quickly, it would have needed to move through the rat population, then the human population, and the rat population would have needed to be much larger and widespread.
It also is unlikely that, if it were the rats, the plague would have been transported over long sea voyages. By the end of the voyage, the rats would have died or become immune, and there would be no plague to spread. Fleas, however, can survive for months without food, and could have easily survived a long voyage.
The most recent evidence suggests that the fleas may not have even lived on the rats; rather, it was likely human fleas and lice that transported the bacteria that infected people. This theory allows for the fact that no evidence of rats even being present has been found in certain areas where the plague ran rampant.
Back to the present day, the vaccinated consider the unvaccinated to be plague rats, spreaders of the pandemic — even in areas with extremely high vaccination rates like Waterford, Ireland (99.7%). The problem remains the same. The last 0.3% are too scarce to be driving the pandemic in any meaningful way. Rather, it is the vaccinated, the fleas not the rats, who are spreading the virus.
The rats will continue to be a historical scapegoat due to widespread ignorance, if nothing else. But next time someone calls you a ‘plague rat’, call them a ‘plague flea’. History will bring you clemency.
You make a good point about modern misunderstandings of pandemic spread. I think that social media footsoldiers have now risen to a similar height of ignorance to join standard-issue journos. Here is an interesting tidbit about the first European Medieval plague that needs a set of explanations: Buboes were described in some patients and they frequently took days to die but occasionally recovering; while others became ill and began to cough up blood during this same time and were dead within 24 hours with characteristic blue marks on the skin (pneumonic plague). These two disease presentations swept through in this time period and within 30 months, evacuated 30% of Europe, including villages and areas far from any trade route. This is too fast for fleas to jump and too fast for gerbils or rats (or humans) to run. This behaves more as a hemorrhagic avian-spread virus. Some exist like Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV), thought this is not the one. In late 1346 the Golden Horde areas north of the Caspian were in regular trade to the east. Indications are that the key reservoir of flea-borne disease seems to point to the Giant Chinese (Mongolian) gerbils, very like American prairie dogs, as the mammalian vector intermediary, that underwent some sort of ecological displacement right prior to that time. This is the kind of condition that leads to zoonoses. And hungry fleas, made hungrier by the presence of Yersinia in their throats, leapt off also-hungry gerbils and attempted to find new hosts. Problem: Until modern times the number of local plague outbreaks within the habitats of these eastern (compared with Crimea) gerbils around Tibet and Xinjiang has been scant. The first cases documented north of the Caucasus in the Khanate were in autumn 1346. By February 1347 it had spread south of the Caucasus, to Crimea, then *instantly* and almost simultaneously to Constantinople, Cyprus, Crete, Peloponneses, Sicily, Sardinia, Malta, Mallorca, Marseilles, Genoa, and Venice by June. This is the naval port theory of spread. But it suddenly stopped. Then took off again after summer as if there were a seasonality to it. It proceeded north into Aquitaine, British Isles, Scandinavia and back east. These are the migratory patterns of some birds even now. I don't know what the actual answer is about etiological agent, the science is unsettled though they will, try to say it is. However, I bet I could get a grant to study it if I could find a way to work in a climate charge theory of zoonotic plague that exonerates China for once. Oh wait, others already have.
rats living on rats should be fleas on rats. 3rd from last paragraph.